19 March 2017 12:41 AM

I wonder if the Tories are beginning to wish they had not tried quite so hard to win the 2015 Election. Think of all the mess and humiliation they would have been spared if they hadn’t.

I do not think they won it ‘fairly and squarely’, as David Cameron ludicrously said on Thursday. I don’t think he thinks so either, really. And things which are wrongly come by tend to turn to dust and ashes in the hands of those who have schemed to get them.

So it is in this case. I have long believed that Mr Cameron did not intend or expect to win a majority. He wanted a second coalition, which could cast aside his insincere promise to hold an EU referendum and his impractical pledge to freeze taxes and National Insurance.

Now look what has happened – the most ridiculous government in modern history, flailing about as it tries to obey a referendum verdict it hates, and abandoning its Budget within hours of issuing it.

The silly manifesto the Tories threw together in 2015 was never meant to be put into action and has been nothing but trouble. I wonder what other nasty surprises are lurking in its yellowing pages.

A sour and persistent smell, like the whiff from a neglected fridge, now hangs over the Government. The £70,000 fine imposed on the supposedly professional Tory Party, for blatantly breaking Election rules, may only be the start of an enormous landslide of scandal and embarrassment, dragging on for years to come and reaching into very high places.

I cannot ever remember this country feeling so much like a Latin American banana republic. All we need to complete the picture is some bananas, and some hyper-inflation.

And who knows if we cannot contrive that, too? After the 2008 crash, the Queen asked why nobody saw it coming. Well, after the next crash, which is just a matter of time, perhaps I will be here to tell her that I saw it coming. Anyone who can count can see it coming, if he wants.

And the mess we are making of leaving the EU may help that along. How much are we going to have to pay to get access to the Single Market we could have stayed in by joining the European Economic Area?

How on earth are we going to keep the United Kingdom in one piece by being rigid and stubborn? If I were Scottish, I would be infuriated by Theresa May’s refusal to allow another vote on independence.

'How on earth are we going to keep the United Kingdom in one piece by being rigid and stubborn? If I were Scottish, I would be infuriated by Theresa May’s refusal to allow another vote on independence'

This is false toughness. English foot-stamping does not go down well in today’s Scotland. The last thing we should do is encourage an emotional campaign based on wounded pride rather than on hard facts.

What if it goes wrong and there is an overwhelming unofficial vote to leave? Surely a better approach would be to be as generous as possible, to say: ‘Of course you must be free to vote. We are friends who have fought alongside each other for centuries, and trust each other completely. And if you really wish to go, that is your affair. That is the kind of people we are. But we hope that you won’t and will always welcome you back if you change your minds.’

As for Ireland, I simply cannot see why the Government is so complacent about the seething crisis that is building up there over the prospect of a nightmare hard border from Warrenpoint to Londonderry. There is real danger here, and it had better be faced soon.

The pathetic tale of HMS Dunroamin

The woeful state of Her Majesty’s Navy is a national shame. Every government that has failed to keep up the strength of the Fleet has paid for it in the end, and it is ridiculous for a trading nation such as we are to neglect seapower.

The mean folly of Labour and Tory governments is now doing lasting damage to both Army and Navy, sawing into their very bone to save money. The crucial thing that is being lost is the accumulated experience of centuries, passed on by a solid core of trained men. If this goes on, we’ll end up with as much Naval tradition and prowess as Luxembourg.

And the shortage of skilled sailors has now led to the inexcusable waste of a £1billion stealth warship, HMS Dauntless.

The immensely expensive Type 45 destroyer, which went into service in 2010, hasn’t moved an inch under her own power for a whole year. She is stuck, tied up at her Portsmouth berth.

She is officially described as a ‘training ship’, a role normally taken by worn-out and obsolete vessels. A Navy statement lamely insists the ship is still ‘very much part of the fleet… an important part of our drive to improve training and career opportunities’.

I think we may need to change our ship-naming policy. Away with the romantic titles of old. Instead we can have HMS Motionless, HMS Deficit, HMS Mothballs and HMS Dunroamin.

The West kills civilians just like 'evil' Putin

In what important way is the West’s bombing of Mosul, now going on, different from Russian bombing of Aleppo last December?

In both cases, heavily armed and ruthless Islamist fanatics have used civilians as human shields as they fight to the finish in thickly populated city streets and backyards.

In both cases, innocent civilians have, regrettably, died or been badly injured in the bombardment. In Mosul, estimates are that at least 300 civilians have already died during Western air attacks on Islamic State positions.

Most of us would accept, with a heavy heart, that this is the horrible price we have to pay for the defeat of IS. But when Russian forces did the same in Aleppo, the action was denounced almost everywhere as a hideous and deliberate war crime.

What’s the reason? In my view, it’s propaganda – and some of the media’s gullible willingness to believe it. IS’s close cousins, the bearded zealots of the Al-Nusra Front, used sophisticated techniques to persuade journalists (almost all far away from the scene) that the Russians were the bad guys.

So we ended with democratic, Western media, normally busy denouncing Islamist extremism, giving sympathetic coverage to some of the worst jihadists in the world. When Mosul falls, as it will, and those who defeated IS are applauded, as they will rightly be, please think about this.

*******

Why should Hollywood Royalty be 'nervous?

Apparently the actress Angelina Jolie ‘confessed to feeling a little nervous’ as she arrived to give her first lecture as a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. I can’t think why. Hollywood Royalty, like Rock Royalty, are surrounded by automatic fawning and applause, much as actual aristocrats used to be worshipped by servile snobs in the old days. Embarrassed, perhaps. Nervous, never.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

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27 February 2017 2:13 PM

And still the political experts drone on about Jeremy Corbyn and the future of the Labour Party. They say ‘Labour can’t win an election with Jeremy Corbyn as its leader.’

This is quite true. But it is fatuous to say it. For much more important is the fact that Labour could not win an election with any conceivable leader.

Labour’s collapse in Scotland, combined with its long-term decay in the South of England, means that it cannot possibly govern on its own unless there is some sort of cataclysm (such as a collapse of Sterling accompanied by hyper-inflation, mass unemployment, war or pestilence) which wholly changes the British political landscape.

Labour’s only future lies in some sort of alliance , formal or informal, with the SNP. That, by contrast, is perfectly possible and I am amazed people don’t think about it more, now that the English minority parties are so small and ineffectual. Mr Corbyn’s old-fashioned statist policies are still very popular in Scotland, as is his view of foreign policy. Provided he keeps quiet about his sympathy for our exit from the EU, he might be able to reach a perfectly good arrangement with Ms Sturgeon and Mr Salmond.

Indeed, I’d guess the Corbynites have much more in common with the SNP than do his Blairite opponents. They, after all, mistakenly pursued devolution in the belief it would put an end to the nationalists. This must count as one of the biggest political blunders of modern times. And the Blairites’ well-oiled Eurocommunist cultural revolution probably looks a bit poncey to Scottish leftists people whose idea of socialism still has its origins in raw coalfield Communism and shipyard Bolshevism,

The subject is made even more complicated by the ‘Scotland in Europe’ policy of the SNP, which plainly hoped to achieve independence from London by seeking dependence on Brussels and Frankfurt instead. This path is now blocked by the UK’s exit from the EU(if it ever actually happens). Actual independence from London, with no source of subsidy or national defence or foreign diplomatic representation, a stand-alone currency and borders to defend is a far bigger leap in the dark than achieving equal status with, say, Lithuania or Slovenia (flag, anthem, seat at table in Brussels, er, that’s it).

But that’s a diversion from the basic Labour problem. The big money which once kept New Labour in being has all deserted to the Tories, who have become New Labour (without actually understanding the project on which they are engaged, but then most of New Labour including poor, dim Anthony, were in the same fix). And, as I pointed out in this analysis of the 2015 election, http://dailym.ai/2lMAhvq, were it not for the deployment of big money and dark arts, Labour would have done significantly better, and the Tories worse, in that contest. The Lib Dems would also have survived as a sizeable Parliamentary faction.

Big money, combined with BBC favour under the Broadcasting rules, and of course the ‘mandate of heaven’ which decides which way most of the media will go, is now far more important in British elections than it used to be. The old system of volunteer workers and mass membership parties has almost completely died. Union money, once a significant counter-balance to the Tories’ fundraising powers, now simply isn’t as big as the huge donors that bankrolled the Blair years, and the hedge fund billions that keep the New Tories afloat.

Anyway, by-elections were never much use as a barometer of anything. I used to cover lots of them, and they were all festivals of the oppressed, in which people started from their usual allegiances to have a bit of fun. That doesn’t stop people using them to get what they want. The late Gerald Kaufman ( as I can now reveal) told me and others over a long-ago and utterly hilarious lunch-table that Labour’s anti-Michael Foot faction had been hoping with all their might that Labour would lose the March 1983 Darlington by-election, which I had spent some time reporting for my then newspaper, making the acquaintance of the man now known as Sir Michael Fallon, Secretary of State for Defence, then the youthful Tory candidate. Alas, the SDP candidate (who had been in the lead) made a fool of himself at a televised hustings, and Labour’s Oswald (Ossie) O’ Brien scored an unexpected triumph. This didn’t actually mean that Labour was on the road to recovery. It was all very local.

Plans a for a putsch against the late Michael Foot (who would have been replaced by the late Denis Healey) had to be scrapped at the last moment, and Foot duly led his party to a romantic disaster in June that year. I don’t think Denis Healey could possibly have won, or even done all that much better. The SDP-Liberal Alliance, at that time, was at the height of its strength and Healey, though an effective fighter, didn’t really have much of an answer to them. The Royal Navy had saved the late Margaret Thatcher’s bacon in the Falklands the year before, and she had taken the political credit which that fine fighting service actually deserved. But anyway, you get the point.

As for Mr Corbyn, what can he do? He has been lawfully and justly elected according to the rules of his party. If anyone challenges him again, he will win again. Parties which have been driven into the powerless margins tend to indulge themselves a bit, as the irresponsibility is also a kind of freedom.

And who can feel sorry for all the ambitious Blairites, who joined New Labour back in the Blair-Brown years , sure that they would move smoothly up to ministerial office, and now finding themselves seething on Mr Corbyn’s back-benches, all hope of preferment gone? Not I, anyway.

No wonder so many of them are drifting off to do other things. Pure reason would tell them to join the Tories, who now stand for all the things New Labour used to stand for, national indebtedness, social and moral revolution and globalism, enlivened by occasional crazy foreign wars. But of course tribal feeling (which has nothing to do with politics) prevents them from crossing the floor. It’s not, I’d guess, that *they* have much tribal feeling. But their voters in their constituencies do, and won’t forgive them. It’s a pity there aren’t enough museums to go round, for them all to find new jobs.

Perhaps they’re hoping (not unreasonably) for a smash, in which everything will change again. The Tories , after all, are not exactly strong or united. It’s possible (watch this space) that they may even lose their majority before this Parliament is over. As for unity, it’s completely artificial, as is Mrs May’s supposed iron control. Like John major before her, she has the job because She’s not david Cameron or Al ‘Boris’ Johnson. The moment it’s safe for Mr Johnson, in particular, to seek high office again, Mrs May’s position is in jeopardy. But as things stand, nobody at the top of the Tory party wants the job of negotiating an exit they don’t believe in.

Let her make a hash of it ( as she may well) and then her rather unearned reputation for steely competence will vanish in a morning. I still don’t think anyone realises just how perilous these negotiations are going to be, and how bad a mess we’re already making of them ( a mess which I think results from Mrs May wanting to persuade anti-EU voters that she can be trusted by them even though she doesn’t agree with them) . Meanwhile, the 52% who voted Leave have no organised voice or vote in Parliament f9or when things get awkward, as they will. But fear of their anger motivates all wise MPs, who now seek to outdo each other in enthusiasm for a project most of them don’t support. This is not, actually, a very good basis for action. If you genuinely believe in a cause, you can make intelligent compromises in pursuit of your ultimate goal. If you don’t, you won’t dare. Jeremy Corbyn’s difficulties are as nothing compared to those of Chairman May.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a critical article about her in the press. Mysteriously, this Scottish politician who has never held a Cabinet Post or even sat at Westminster was the leading Tory pro-EU voice on the BBC’s bizarre Wembley EU debate on Tuesday evening, matched against the Exit campaign’s biggest artillery, Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson. I haven’t been able to stomach the entire rather nasty event, but what I have seen was pretty banal. She was praised for her part in the Scottish referendum campaign. Then she was praised for ‘pushing Labour into third place’ in the recent Scottish Parliamentary elections. In fact, Labour’s collapse, now an avalanche, and the similar collapse in the Scottish Liberal Democrats reshuffled the order and size of Scotland’s powerless and irrelevant minority parties, all of them hopelessly outvoted by the Scottish Nationalists. I doubt if Ms Davidson’s talents at being photographed with pints of beer had much to do with it. I’ll return to the strange position of Scotland’s Tory Party later.

I might add that Labour’s collapse (now probably irreversible in Scotland) was actually caused by David Cameron’s handling of the post-referendum crisis, when he turned the ‘pledge’ of more devolved powers into an aggressive attempt (‘English Votes for English Laws’) to exclude Scottish MPs and voters from influencing national UK decisions. Scottish voters revenged themselves on Labour (which had been prominent in the pro-Union campaign). It provided many with the excuse which they had long needed to abandon the dying Labour Party and switch to the SNP.

But what does the Tory party in Scotland actually stand for? What, most interestingly of all, would happen to it if Scotland became fully independent from London ( as I think is inevitable) , and accepted formal direct submission to Brussels on its own account, rather than via London, thus abolishing the formal, if forgotten, reason for the Scottish Tory Party’s very existence?

I think it would survive, as a political business, becoming perhaps a sort of Scottish Christian Democrat Party, sharing power from time to time with the SNP in a proportional Parliament, providing a safety valve for those Scots not wholly captivated by the SNP’s increasingly unmistakable cultural, moral and political leftism. Indeed, maybe the SNP, its main purpose achieved, would split into leftish and rightish wings.

‘that if elected leader, he would disband the party in favour of setting up a new centre-right party that would be fully autonomous of the UK Conservative Party, but would take the Conservative whip at Westminster. Fraser states that this would be carried out in order to 'de-toxify' the party in Scotland, stating that it would have a distinct Scottish identity, represent Scottish values, support devolution and decentralisation, and fight to maintain Scotland's place within the United Kingdom.’ He also suggested the name ‘Conservative’ should be ditched. He lost, but his suggestions show the state to which the Tories have been reduced in Scotland, where (incredibly) they once held a majority of Parliamentary seats. In fact, in 1955 and 1959, the then Unionist Party wonn an outright majority of votes in Scotland.

The Unionist name was very important. The Scots were not voting for English Toryism, but for a specific form of Scottish Unionism, now quite dead. The closest comparison that can now be made is the various sorts of Unionist in Northern Ireland, many of whom would be Labour supporters in England, but who ally with the Tories at Westminster for national reasons.

Scottish Unionism was specifically opposed to Irish independence, rightly fearing that it would presage a break-up of Union and Empire. It was careful not to call itself ‘Conservative’ because of the strength of Liberalism among Scottish Protestant voters (whom it particularly sought to attract, in a country once nearly as religiously divided as Northern Ireland is now). But in 1965 the Unionists merged with the English and Welsh Tories. They were duly punished, especially in the Thatcher era (though in fact she was in many ways more Liberal than Tory, as was her father, the unforgettable Alderman Roberts). By 1997, they won no Scottish seats at all and were down to 17.5% of the vote. Since then, with many of their voters despairing of Unionism, abandoning the religion of their forebears and switching to the SNP (which offers a new ‘union’ with the EU) , they have been searching for a role.

It is an extraordinary fact that the Daily Record, now seen as the Scottish equivalent of the Daily Mirror, supported the Unionists until 1964, when it switched to Labour (it is now suspected of flirtation with the SNP). There must be a lot of Scottish people who have, in their lives, voted Unionist, Labour and SNP.

Just as in England, the Tories appear to have shed any sort of political baggage to become a political party seeking office for the sake of it.

The FT’s account of the Scottish elections contained this interesting reflection on the nature of Ms Davidson’s party: ‘One of the two Tory candidates elected on the Glasgow list was Adam Tomkins, a law professor and a one-time advocate of abolition of the monarchy. The other was Annie Wells, a food retail manager and single mother with a working-class accent who told one campaign rally how she had won over a sceptical voter who started their conversation with the comment: “Ah’m no a Tory, hen.”’

I think even a casual observer must be able to see that whatever is going on here is not conservatism as most of us understand it. Ms Davidson, after a BBC career where she was no doubt exposed to the strong ideology of that organisation, joined the Tory party in 2009 because she liked the look of David Cameron. Interestingly, she says that her decision to join the military (sadly frustrated by serious injury during training) was sparked off by the sight of British troops in the former Yugoslavia, the anti-Sovereignty prototype for our later catastrophic intervention in Iraq.

But one thing Ms Davidson certainly does believe in is continued British membership of the EU. This belief is actually very profound among most of those, especially the university-schooled professional elite, brought up since 1960. It touches on the most fundamental creeds – internationalism, egalitarianism, the worship of modernity for its own sake and an active rejection of the past as a source of lessons for the present - of the new establishment uniting, whether they like it or not, Ms Davidson with Stephen Kinnock, and possibly Jeremy Corbyn, and David Cameron with my late brother. The great, deep switch from Protestantism, the 1688 settlement and a belief in national sovereignty , to secularism, disdain for sovereignty and a far greater affinity for France in 1789 to England in 1689, has more or less taken place. And enthusiasm for the EU is its badge and banner.

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25 June 2015 3:53 PM

How politically neutral is Her Majesty the Queen? In my view Royal neutrality is a bit of a myth. Her Majesty’s very public endorsement of the 1998 surrender to the IRA, well-publicised in the weeks between the instrument of surrender and the far-from-fair and far-from-frank referendum which endorsed the surrender, was a direct intervention in contentious politics. When I called the Palace at the time and asked them to explain, they told me to ‘consult a constitutional expert’. I asked them if they had a list of approved ones, and the line went quiet.

Of course it did. There is no court of appeal on such things.

Then, in her 2004 Christmas broadcast she proclaimed 'diversity is indeed a strength' - a Royal endorsement of the multiculturalism many oppose and dislike. I thought then, and think now, that this was a breach of impartiality too. And I was worried by her apparent intervention in the Scottish referendum. Was this proper?

What about the Monarch’s apparently warm attitude towards the EU, and her seeming endorsement of its disputed and dubious claim to be a force for peace and harmony, which many believe was exposed in this Berlin speech on Thursday, delivered to an enthusiastically nodding Angela Merkel? Division in Europe dangerous? Who says? The safest period of my life was the Cold War, far more peaceful than now, as the EU rampages around the Balkans and the Ukraine.

What’s interesting is that under English or United Kingdom law and precedent, the Queen , being part of Parliament (‘The Queen in Parliament’ ) is simply not able to vote for members of another part of the legislature. This is part of the wiring of our ancient constitution, not a rule later invented, but a fact.

This is also, as far as I can work it out, why she cannot issue herself with a passport, which (although it is an EU document with a flatulent, vestigial rubric on it about an (unidentified, see below) Secretary of State ‘requesting and requiring’ Johnny Foreigner to do this or that, which these days he generally doesn’t) still bears her insignia.

UK passports are still issued under Royal Prerogative, the simplest source of state authority, rather than under Parliamentary law. This may also be why Her Majesty does not have to have a licence plate on her car, though I’m happy to be corrected by anyone who understands this better. I think it’s also why she used not to pay any tax.

However, compare and contrast : ‘Under the Maastricht Treaty, The Queen and other members of the Royal Family would be entitled to vote for the European Parliament, or to stand for election to that Parliament.

‘However, The Queen would only exercise these rights on the advice of her Ministers. Their advice would invariably be that she should neither vote nor stand for an elected position so as not to compromise her neutrality.’

But , as she’s not part of the European Parliament, which actually has sovereignty over this country and legislates for it, under the guidance of the Commission , the European Council and the European Court of Justice, her abstention is a choice, not a constitutional fact.

This is quite interesting, if you like poking about in the hidden wiring of our constitution. For it turns out(and Buckingham Palace has confirmed this to me today) that the Queen, by virtue of being a British *national* (she is not a British *citizen*, and of course was not, in the days when the rest of us had that lost privilege, a *subject* of herself) is a *citizen* of the European Union.

Though born in the then colony of Malta, I was by right of British parentage a British subject from 1951 to 1982. I did not notice that I had lost this historically rather moving and exceptional status until , trapped in some airport by delays, I studied my passport more carefully than usual and found that I had at some point become a citizen, with the ‘right of abode’ in my own country. This happened in 1982. At the same time the passport ceased to say what your occupation was, so anyone who claims that it ‘says in their passport’ that they are something or other ( as people often do) is making up it up.

Not long afterwards, I’d guess 1984 or 1985, I was at a political lunch with the then Home Secretary Leon Brittan, recently deceased, who arrived late explaining that he had been at a ceremony in which the issuing of passports was transferred from the Foreign Office to the Home Office. This was presumably because the passport was about to become an EU document, issued on behalf of the EU by the Home Office, rather than by an independent country declaring that it recognised and protected its people when travelling abroad. The old rubric about ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs’ requesting and requiring all those whom it might concern to afford the bearer all necessary whatsit, etc etc was altered to ‘Her Majesty’s Secretary of State’, unspecified. For all anyone knew, it might be the Secretary of State for Wales, or Drains. I can remember Leon Brittan explaining that this would now mean him, as Home Secretary. I think they left that out because it might alert people to the fact that they were now carrying an EU document. One side-effect of this was that the ancient system under which the SIS (MI6) officer in every embassy was officially the Passport officer had to be abandoned and they had to think of a new cover story.

In 1988 the old stiff blue passport began to be replaced by the Building Society passbook which we have had since, first bearing the words European Community and then , in 1997, ‘European Union’ (the lettering in which ‘European Union’ is stamped on the front cover grows marginally bigger as the years pass, though you need to be observant to notice this). My last proper blue passport, containing a lovely collection of Warsaw Pact visa stamps and my Moscow residence permit, was stolen from a jacket pocket in the old ‘Daily Express ‘ office soon after I returned from Russia in 1992.

Well, now that I and Her Majesty are both EU citizens, whether we want to be or not, What does EU citizenship entail? All is explained here:

So, at the moment, it’s just a few not especially wonderful rights. But then there’s the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (This began life as the original Treaty of Rome but has been substantially revised over the years. It is the core of the EU’s constitution and can be studied in its ‘ consolidated version’ here

In its Part Two, you will find that Article 20, paragraph 2 reads (my emphasis):

Citizenship of the Union is hereby established. Every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union. Citizenship of the Union shall be additional to and not replace national citizenship. 2. Citizens of the Union shall enjoy the rights and be subject to the duties provided for in the Treaties.

It adds that there are, as yet, no duties. But when they think of some, the Treaty already obliges us to be subject to them. All they have to do is devise them and ram them through the EU’s decision-making process. So as far as I can see, the Queen, technically, is a subject of the EU, which, as a Sovereign, she cannot be. A Palace spokesperson told me today that the Queen’s EU citizenship ‘ in no way affects her prerogatives, rights and responsibilities as the Sovereign and Head of State.’

But I’m really not sure that can be so. I’ll see if I can find a constitutional expert.

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04 June 2015 2:54 PM

Some of you may have noticed, in a recent debate on the election at Hay-on-Wye, a reference I made to John le Carre’s first-class novel ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’. I spoke of the ‘very clever knot’ described by le Carre and untangled by George Smiley, by which everything was made to appear the opposite of what it was.

It worked like this. The KGB agent who was actually debriefing the mole inside British intelligence was believed by MI6 to be a Soviet Traitor, the exact opposite of the case. Those who went regularly to meet this KGB man in a secret safe house in North London (surrounded by elaborate precautions) believed they were running a deep-penetration agent inside Soviet intelligence. One of this team of debriefers (you’ll have to read the book to find out which) was in fact an MI6 traitor, who thus managed to hold meetings with his KGB controller, on MI6 premises, at the British taxpayer’s expense and under the protection of MI6. His senior colleagues helped to provide cover for this traitor. The very boldness of the deception made it all the more effective. When it was exposed, the disbelief and fury of the duped was enormous. Had it not been for the detective genius of George Smiley, it might never have been exposed at all. Nothing is, but what is not. Everything is the opposite of what it seems to be. In that way, those who might act against it become its active and committed defenders.

Some remarks on Monday by James Harding, the head of BBC news, brought this to mind again.

The Daily Mail reported on Tuesday : ‘THE boss of BBC News has denied any trace of Left-wing bias despite a series of rows over its coverage in the run-up to the election.

James Harding insisted that the Corporation is always 'scrupulously impartial' and rejected as 'fable' claims that it is prejudiced against Right-wing parties.

However, he did admit to some failings, saying that the BBC had allowed political polls - which predicted some form of coalition - to 'infect [its] thinking'.

As a result, he said, they spent too much time examining which parties might do deals with each other instead of analysing their policies.

Addressing the accusation of bias, Mr Harding told a conference in London: 'I find this increasingly hard to take seriously.

'In the light of the Conservative victory, what's the argument? That the BBC's subtle, sophisticated Left-wing message was so subtle, so very sophisticated that it simply passed the British people by.'

Gosh, how witty.

But it depends entirely for its force on the idea that the Conservative Party is in some way ‘right-wing’. What if it’s not, and the BBC’s behaviour helped that party into office? Perhaps it was quite subtle. Then everything’s upside-down, and everyone’s doing the opposite of what they seem to be doing, aren’t they?

Now, as we have discussed here, the modern Tory Party is not conservative, and has not been for many decades, if it ever was. It is all but impossible to believe that it once contained, at its heart, such people as Janet Young, a committed and determined foe of the sexual revolution.

It is certainly *liberal* in economics, in culture and morality. Many politically unlettered people think of this position, associated with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, as ‘right-wing’. It certainly conflicts with the pre-1989 ideas of the political left, which until the end of the Cold War was still devoted to state ownership of large chunks of the economy.

This devotion, while essential to Soviet Communism, doesn’t actually have any particularly strong connection with Social Democracy. States which are largely Social Democratic, Germany, France, Scandinavia and the Low Countries spring to mind, seem to me to be quite pragmatic about state ownership of the economy, certainly more pragmatic than the 1945 Labour government were. For the Labour Party under Alastair Campbell to pretend to abandon (which they didn’t really) Clause Four of the old Labour rules, wasn’t a great step. In effect, Harold Wilson had abandoned nationalisation as a policy in the 1960s. I still meet people who think New Labour was ‘right-wing’, when in fact the ideas of New Labour came out of Eurocommunism, social and cultural radicalism stripped of Soviet impediments, and was crammed with former Marxists who weren’t all that former, which is why they don’t like it mentioned to this day.

The modern Labour equivalent of Clause Four is in fact comprehensive education, something David Blunkett repeatedly pledged never to abandon during the Blair years, and which he legislated to make compulsory in all new schools. This is because it is the absolute key and foundation of Labour’s commitment to ostensible egalitarianism, a position it will not abandon. Of course, its own leaders and rich supporters don’t believe in this, and are very skilled at avoiding it in their own lives. But they do very much want to impose it on the fast-declining independent middle-class, the main opposition to the strong state and the main defender of common sense against dogma.

Now we come to the very clever knot in British politics, the one which you must undo to grasp what is actually going on. For this, readers are strongly recommended to get hold of my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’, or its earlier hardback version. The Broken Compass’ (they are broadly the same but ‘The Cameron Delusion’ was brought up to date to deal with Cameron Toryism).

Read especially the early chapter ‘The Power of Lunch’ (the index, itself a work of art, will find the passage if you look up the name ‘Goslett, Miles’).

It recounts the failure of a Freedom of Information request, pursued doggedly by Miles Goslett, to obtain details of a meeting at the Palace of Westminster on 28th February 2008. The location is important because who went to see whom is also important in working out who was setting the agenda.

What we *do* know about this meeting is that it was hosted by David Cameron, then Leader of the Opposition, and his visitors were Mark Thompson, then Director-General of the Corporation, and Caroline Thomson(no relation – though ‘Thomson and Thompson’ reminds one of the two hopeless detectives in the Tintin books), at that stage the BBC’s chief political commissar. Caroline, whom I know slightly, is very well-connected in the left liberal establishment, especially its pro-EU wing. Her father was the former Labour MP, later Social Democrat peer Lord Thomson of Monifieth, her husband Roger Liddle, Eurocrat extraordinaire ( from 1997-2004 special adviser to the Blair creature on EU matters), who in turn became Baron Liddle of Carlisle in 2010 (his supporters were Lord Mandelson and Lord (William) Rodgers).

This was not a meeting about Tory policy on the BBC (Licence fee, Charter etc). BBC officials were having other meetings with the relevant Shadow Cabinet members about that.

This was, I believe, a meeting about the BBC’s policy towards the Tory Party. And that is why they won’t talk about it.

Round about the same time, some will remember, the conservative media were rather sceptical of Mr Cameron’s re-engineering of the Tories, and concerned that they had been cowed into liberal policies by a fear of the BBC as we see here in a (BBC) report of a rare speech by the editor of the Daily Mail:

‘I recently had lunch with the BBC’s Director General and I don’t think it’s breaking a confidence to reveal that he told me that their research showed that the BBC was no longer perceived as being anti-Tory. “That’s because you’ve broken the buggers”, I said laughing.’

He added : ‘Cameron’s cuddly blend of eco-politics and work-life balance, his embrace of Polly Toynbee – a columnist who loathes everything Conservatism stands for but is a totemic figure to the BBC – his sidelining of Thatcherism and his banishing of all talk of lower taxes, lower immigration and Euro scepticism, are all part of the Tories’ blood sacrifice to the BBC God.’

This is very perceptive. The re-engineering of the Tory brand in this period might have been (in my view almost certainly was) aimed at placating the BBC, the arbiter of orthodoxy and the gatekeeper of government. Suddenly the Tories were Greener than Green, metrosexual, Euro-friendly, comprehensive-friendly, equality-friendly, immigrant friendly. For many of them this was no great effort. The private opinions of the Tory upper deck have for many years been left-liberal, with concessions made at conference-time and during elections, during which these people try to appear to be conservative, by talking tough on crime, immigration, the EU, drugs, human rights, schools etc, in non-specific, non-committal ways which will never translate into real policy.

Even odder, in this instance, was that Mr Cameron (whose leftish sexual politics I explored and recorded in my lonely way in 2010, to the interest of nobody,

went ahead with the legalisation of same-sex marriage without putting it in his manifesto, a very clear sign that his real, true views are further to the left even than he confessed in his BBC-wooing period before 2010.

There’s also the excellent point made by my old adversary David Aaronovitch, in ‘The Times’ of 29th April 2008, that ‘Tony Blair's mission, unexplained even to himself perhaps, was to make it not matter whether the Tories came back, as they would be hemmed in by Blairism just as Labour was by Thatcherism’.

This may also have helped the BBC come round. But come round it did. In 1997 and afterwards, the BBC did not of course openly shout ‘Vote Labour’. It just used a lot of energy reporting on Tory ‘splits’ and rows. All parties are split, always, and generally these splits and rows remain minor unless exploited by active media coverage.

It also virtually ignored everything they said that wasn’t to do with a split or a row. Then the ‘split’ reporting faded, and indeed the splitometer was directed instead at Gordon Brown’s Labour government. Tory speeches and policy initiatives were reported more fully and more respectfully. The Tories had in short, been presented with the cloak of electability and Gordon Brown had been robbed of it. Only incredibly expensive, day-to-day, hour-to-hour monitoring across all the channels for years could actually demonstrated this, and who can afford that. It was done on the edge of a remark, or by nuance, timing. It wasn’t organised or directed. It was just permitted, when it previously hadn’t been, and everyone knew it. Conventional wisdom understood that the Tories were on their way back, and indeed went so far as to believe they could actually win in 2010, which *was* a physical impossibility. All this was helped by Gordon Brown’s unfashionably conservative manners and style of dress, his rejection of Blairite style, things that made BBC liberals less bothered about whether he won or lost.

The election of Ed Miliband, a second Brown, ensured that the Tories would continue to receive the blessings of BBC patronage. I wonder if, had David Miliband been picked instead, things would have been the same. I suspect not, though we shall never know. John Rentoul, of the Independent on Sunday, is a useful Blairite barometer on such things. I don’t get the impression he is especially grieved by the Labour downfall last month.

But that chance to reconnect the BBC with a Blairite Labour Party has gone. Labour is almost certainly done for now, because the Scottish loss has destroyed it as a national party, probably for good, while the Tory party has become New Labour. David Cameron truly is the heir to Blair, and UKIP can scrabble for the Noisy Minority which is all that is now left of a supposed ‘Silent Majority’ that, by staying silent and indeed endorsing its own destruction by voting Tory, allowed itself to be marginalised and defeated.

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20 April 2015 2:29 PM

Have you noticed that the entire Tory election campaign is based on a belief that the Conservative and Unionist Party (its increasingly ludicrous official name) is automatically entitled to be the government, and indeed to choose its own opposition? This is particularly startling in a party that is shrinking in membership by the day, has in the past few decades lost the great majority of its members and the support of millions of its voters, and has not won a general election since 1992, which seems to me to be 23 years ago.

Like a vast, bawling spoiled toddler, the Tory Party howls and snivels about how the mere possibility that anyone else might be the government, or anyone else might win seats in Parliament and so be entitled to determine the direction of events, is axiomatically unjust. The belief that it is in some way the only rightful government, despite not being able to get many votes, is implicit in everything it says.

In the same way, it cannot grasp that it has alienated many who once supported it, by its own deliberate actions. It dismisses its own disgruntled supporters, who leave it for other loyalties, as ‘fruitcakes and closet racists’, before grasping that this may be unwise and then attempting to woo the self-same ‘fruitcakes and closet racists’, whose fruitcakey and closet racist votes it now finds it needs. If the Tory party were a character in a Roald Dahl children’s story, I think it would have an ugly name and come to a sticky end.

Its entire campaign until last week was based on its opinion (not necessarily binding on all, nor shared by all, as it turned out) that the Labour Party had chosen the wrong leader. Well, leave aside the fact that the Labour Party is separate from the Tory Party partly because it represents different interests and different parts of the country, it is surely reasonable for that party to pick a leader the Tories don’t like. I have to admit that I have not heard any senior Labour person grouch about the undoubtedly strange Tory choice of an utterly-inexperienced and undistinguished PR man (whose bad decisions are one of the principal causes of the current refugee tragedy in the Mediterranean) as their leader. Anyway, that one blew up in the Tory Party’s face when they pumped it up too hard.

So they are currently weeping and keening about the fact that large numbers of Scots voters support the SNP and wish to leave the UK. This, apparently is going to have some effect on Labour if they try to form a minority government after May 7th. Well, so it may. It will have an effect on whoever tries to form such a government, even if it is the Tories. It would even have an effect on the majority government which is, to put it mildly, the least likely outcome of the current campaign. Think about it. If the Scottish people overwhelmingly elect representatives who wish to leave the UK, in preference to representatives who wish to stay, then London is going to have to take that view increasingly seriously.

This isn’t a new problem. It was Mr Cameron’s coalition which granted the referendum to the SNP, when it was much weaker than it is now. It was Mr Cameron who handled (mishandled?) the negotiations over the question that would be asked, and who was repeatedly (in the view of most dispassionate observers) outmanoeuvred by Alex Salmond. It was Mr Cameron who panicked when the vote threatened to go in favour of secession. It was Mr Cameron who stimulated the SNP surge by playing party politics on ‘English votes for English laws’ rather than in keeping the ‘vow’ he and others had made to grant new powers to Scotland after the referendum.

I might add that the Tory party is itself unable to persuade most people in Scotland to elect its representatives to anything. As this was not always so, this presumably has something to do with the quality of its leadership and establishment, the very people who ensured Mr Cameron’s smooth accession to the leadership. (Readers here will be familiar with my argument that the United Kingdom cannot coexist in these islands with the European Union, which offers the UK’s constituent parts an alternative form of federation which is rather appealing to the political classes of Scotland and Wales).

And now? Say the Tories manage to win enough seats to form a minority government, a perfectly feasible outcome, or even a majority government. Will they be able to ignore the SNP surge, likely to give the SNP another strong majority in the next Scottish elections, on top of its large new bloc of MPs at Westminster, giving them an almost clean sweep of the entire territory of Scotland?

Of course not, especially since it is absolutely in the Tory Party’s interest that Scotland leaves the UK, for crude electoral calculation ( as many times discussed on this weblog, notably in the recent reference to Michael Portillo) .

One of this weblog’s favourite rhymes is the one that goes ‘The more that he talked of his honour, the faster we counted the spoons’. Well, the more that Mr Cameron berates Labour for being the putative puppet of the SNP, the more I suspect that this is the role he intends and indeed hopes to play himself.

If he is genuinely as alarmed by the prospect of a Scottish defection as he claims, and if he thinks (as he appears to) that the expressed will of Scottish voters cannot be allowed to prevail, he has one option.

He must offer to all the UK parties the idea of a coalition to maintain the unity of the United Kingdom (difficult, given that the departure of Northern Ireland, which we must concede under international treaty if a majority vote for it, is likely to awaken as an issue quite soon, but there).

Whether this would entail an actual coalition government may well depend on the scale of the ghastly economic crisis which is going to be officially acknowledged some time during the coming summer. The Greek problem is still very serious, and could trigger severe problems in Euroland.

The Tories might also simply offer an ad hoc alliance on this issue - a pact to vote with Labour against a further Scottish referendum, or any more moves towards Scottish independence. They could also offer their votes to prevent any SNP blackmail over defence, or over economic measures designed to overcome our deficit, on which Labour and the Tories are close to agreement. If Labour had any sense, they would ask Mr Cameron to commit himself to something of the kind.

Because I do not think Mr Cameron would make any such commitment. He wishes to have a free hand to make some sort of deal with the SNP, if he hangs on to office. His supposed concern for the Union, and for the power of Parliament to make the laws for England without Scottish interference, are not principled but tactical, as he showed quite clearly in the days after the referendum last September.

I believe that, with a great show of reluctance, as crammed with fake mourning and as loaded down with insincerity as a gangster’s wreath-strewn funeral, the Tory Party secretly hopes for and will secretly celebrate a Scottish exit from the UK.

The SNP feels much the same way, hence its brazen co-operation with the Tory attempt to portray Labour as the SNP’s tool and patsy, encouraged by Nicola Sturgeon’s unwanted public wooing of Ed Miliband at last week’s TV debate.

Labour, for equally unprincipled reasons (namely, the permanent loss of any hope of ever again forming a majority government), genuinely hates the idea of a Scottish exit. Its mourning at the funeral of the UK will be real, if selfish.

19 April 2015 12:04 AM

Funny how little we have heard from British liberals about a rather nasty outbreak of anti-immigrant violence this week.

Black South Africans burst on to the streets of Durban and Johannesburg, savagely attacking and threatening black immigrants from other parts of Africa.

Whatever this is, it isn’t ‘racist’. The assailants and victims alike are almost all black Africans. The fact that it is happening in a country liberals pretend is a rainbow paradise (when it isn't) is also hard for them to handle.

The sad truth is that mass migration, whatever the colour of the skins of those involved, upsets and worries indigenous people, especially the poorest. If it is not controlled – and South Africa has utterly failed to control it for many years – it can lead to serious social conflict.

And if you think this doesn't affect us, you are worryingly wrong. For Africa is exploding north and south, as war and famine uproot its unhappy millions.

David Cameron’s irresponsible and ignorant intervention in Libya (which alone should be enough to ensure he never holds responsible office again) is now causing one of the greatest human upheavals of modern times.

A wave of human misery is now heading to Europe – and eventually to Britain – from the fiery chaos of post-Cameron Libya.

In one week, at least 10,000 migrants have been ferried to Italy by greedy criminal traffickers.

These calculating monsters put only enough fuel in the tanks of their boats to get them halfway across. Then they call the Italian coastguard to tell them to pick up the drifting victims before they drown or die of exposure.

And of course civilised Europe does pick them up. What choice do we have? It goes against centuries of Christianity to leave them (as the ruthless traffickers happily do) to their fate, and hope that this will discourage them.

And how can we send them back to the failed and lawless state which has already driven them out after robbing them? So it will not be long before they arrive at Calais and join the queue to be smuggled into Britain.

I can see no obvious solution to this. It reminds me of the great illegal migration of Latin Americans that utterly transformed the USA in the 1990s, and continues to do so.

Should we have listened more carefully to Colonel Gaddafi, whom we drove from power and left to be murdered in a ditch? By assisting in his overthrow, have we replaced the terrible with the horrible?

Back in August 2010, the Libyan despot went to Rome and made a blackmailing offer which many Italian politicians must now be wishing they had accepted.

Gaddafi said: ‘Italy needs to convince her European allies to accept this Libyan proposal – €5 billion [then about £4 billion] to Libya to stop illegal immigration. ‘Europe runs the risk of turning black from illegal immigration, it could turn into Africa. We need support from the European Union to stop this army trying to get across from Libya, which is their entry point.

‘At the moment there is a dangerous level of immigration from Africa into Europe and we don’t know what will happen.

‘What will be the reaction of the white Christian Europeans to this mass of hungry, uneducated Africans?’

You will have to look up what he said next as it is simply too shocking and unpleasant for me to reproduce.

That’s the problem. While we won’t think about it, the unthinkable is actually happening, and we have no idea what to do.

Fairy tale of the Big Bad Bear

Once again there is a lot of squawking about Russian warships passing through the ‘English Channel’ or antique Russian bombers approaching our airspace.

I will let you into a secret. The Channel is an international waterway through which the Russians are quite free to pass, and over which we have no exclusive right.

And no Russian warplane has entered British airspace.

Meanwhile, military activity by Nato aircraft close to the borders of Russia has doubled since early 2014, totalling 3,000 sorties that year. So it’s not just the Big Bad Bear.

Also, do you recall the noisy chorus which pretty much assumed Russia’s President Putin was behind the Moscow murder of his liberal opponent Boris Nemtsov?

Well, maybe he was, but oughtn’t the same people to be just as worried about the mysterious deaths of ten prominent opponents of Ukraine’s new pro-Nato government since February 2014?

The most recent were Oleg Kalashnikov, a supporter of deposed President Yanukovych, found shot dead on Wednesday, and a pro-Russian journalist, Oles Buzyna, murdered by masked gunmen in a drive-by shooting outside his Kiev home on Thursday.

I have no idea who killed them or why. But the belief that Russia is the heart of darkness, and Ukraine is a law-governed, clean Utopia, is ridiculous and silly.

Yet again Tory politicians and commentators are talking up the dull and mechanical Leftist Nicola Sturgeon.

I don’t myself think she is anything special, and am baffled by the praise she receives. But do the Tories have another agenda? Do they secretly want Scotland out of the Union? I am certain that they do. They’ll never say so openly, but former Tory Cabinet Minister Michael Portillo can afford to be frank now he’s become a BBC favourite.

He said in July 2006 that the Scots would probably be better off without English subsidies, adding: ‘From the point of political advantage, the Conservatives have a better chance of being in government if Scotland is not part of the affair.’

Challenged on this by Andrew Neil, he said: ‘You are continuing to assume the Union is sacrosanct. That is not an assumption I make any more.’

I wonder if the same thought has crossed other minds? It could explain the Government’s otherwise inexplicably clumsy handling of the independence referendum and its result.

There is no such thing as a ‘right to buy’. Proper conservatives don’t believe in invented, taxpayer-subsidised rights, a creation of liberals.

They believe in freedom. And the break-up of council estates was one of the most unconservative things that ever happened, making life harder for young families and destroying settled communities.

I was moved by the picture of two Muslims praying at a football match, and impressed by their courage in professing their faith in such a secular place as Anfield.

How can this be a disgrace, as one fan spluttered? Didn't we once sing Abide With Me at the Cup Final?

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13 April 2015 11:19 AM

Here’s an interesting footnote on the modern Tory Party’s true attitude towards Scotland. It made little impact at the time, because a Scottish exit then seemed so far away, rather than imminent, as it does now) .

The news story involved alleges that the words spoken by Michael Portillo would 'anger' David Cameron. I don't know if they did, and can find no record of any such anger. But if so, was that because what Mr Portillo said was unrepresentative of true feeling in his party? Or because it was representative, and therefore best kept quiet?

It’s also perfectly true that Michael Portillo, at the time he said the words reported, was an ex-politician. Well, what of it? Had he still been serving, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been so frank. But we must remember that Mr Portillo was a heavyweight, a Cabinet Minister widely believed by many to be a possible leader.

Indeed, if things had fallen out slightly differently, he might have been the Blairite candidate to lead the Tory Party back into BBC and establishment favour.

So it’s not unreasonable to suggest that similar thoughts may have crossed the minds of others in that party. What people think about most closely is what they also never ever say.

‘FORMER Tory minister Michael Portillo called last night for Britain to be broken up because England and Scotland would be better off without each other.

He said the United Kingdom is no longer 'sacrosanct' and the Conservatives should ditch their commitment to the 1707 Act of Union and push for English independence.

Mr Portillo's views come amid a growing backlash against the Union. Many in England believe Scotland gets too much of Britain's budget and is effectively subsidised.

They also claim it is not right that Scottish MPs can vote at Westminster, while English MPs have no influence on the Scottish Parliament.

Mr Portillo's comments will anger David Cameron, who fears the Tories are seen as an English, rather than a British, party. But Mr Portillo insists breaking up the Union would give the Tories the best chance of seizing power in England, where they have a majority. On the BBC politics show This Week, he was challenged by host Andrew Neil, who asked: 'So for party advantage, you are prepared to break up our country?' Mr Portillo replied: 'No, not just for party advantage. The Scots would be probably a great deal better off if they weren't subsidised by England.

'From the point of political advantage, the Conservatives have a better chance of being in government if Scotland is not part of the affair.

'You are continuing to assume the Union is sacrosanct. That is not an assumption I make any more.' He also backed Tory frontbench MP Alan Duncan's claim that a Scottish MP could not be Prime Minister – a clear attack on Gordon Brown.

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29 March 2015 12:40 AM

This has been a week of memorable fakery. A Muslim Tory parliamentary candidate was caught colluding with ultra-nationalists to try to look good. The Government hatched a sneaky and dishonourable plot to destroy the Speaker, for daring to stand up to them.

So it seems to me to be worth asking if David Cameron and Alex Salmond are secretly working together.

The Tories claim to be outraged that the Scottish Nationalists say they will deny them a majority. Why? They have no divine right to rule.

Isn’t all this shouting too loud to be true? And the SNP’s voters, who can’t stand the Tories, would never forgive their leaders if they propped up a Cameron government.

The SNP is under no obligation to help the Tories into office, though you might get that impression from the toady Blairite media who have adopted David Cameron, the self-proclaimed heir to Blair, as their last best hope.

This, by the way, explains why Islington lefties and the BBC are so fervently backing David Cameron against Ed Miliband – and is one of the reasons why I am seriously thinking of registering to vote for the first time in 30 years, and casting my ballot for Labour.

The fashionable Left’s loathing of Mr Miliband, and the incessant spiteful bullying and belittling of this man by much of my trade, make me want to stand up for him against this nasty mob, even though I disagree with him about almost everything.

At least I actually know what the Labour leader’s true opinions are. This is more than can be said for Mr Cameron, whose real aims are harder to grasp than a lavishly greased piglet.

So you see how the world’s turning upside down. Nothing’s what it seems in this Election. For instance, I think the SNP actually want the Tories to dominate the next government.

That’s why they are so helpfully playing this game in which Labour are damaged by being portrayed as Alex Salmond’s prisoners. If Scotland leaves the UK, Tory hopes of power grow, and Labour’s hopes dwindle.

Though nobody in the Tory high command will openly say this, the Conservative Party knows that its only hope of ever again commanding a Westminster majority and governing alone lies in a Scottish exit from the UK.

Nobody will ever be able to say for certain if the Government’s woeful mishandling of the Scottish issue was deliberate sabotage of the UK or mere incompetence. My own guess is that it was bungled ‘accidentally on purpose’, as we used to say in my childhood. What is certain is that it has brought Scotland closer to departure than anyone could possibly have imagined five years back.

And that one of the many unpleasant shocks waiting for us on the far side of this Election will be the break-up of our country, brought about with many crocodile tears, by the very party that pretends to stand for the Union.

If 'bogey man' Ed did this, we'd all be very sniffy...

Have you ever wondered what happened to the vegetables so wantonly sacrificed in the BBC’s carefully stage-managed TV advertisement for David Cameron?

Keen-eyed viewers will have noted the Prime Minister twice giving his nose a jolly good wipe with the back of his hand, as he chopped away at his groceries. Just imagine what would have happened to Ed Miliband if he’d done that: action replays and front-page pictures for days.

But Ed is a target, and Dave isn’t.

So I very much hope that the poor vegetables, so unhygienically treated, ended in the slop bucket, rather than being fed to the Camerons’ innocent children.

But there were other vegetables present. What did the BBC reporter, James Landale, think he was doing, joining in this shameless performance by subserviently tending to a lettuce? He might as well have knelt and done up Mr Cameron’s shoes for him, or some other fagging duty.

If Tory High Command want to make a TV commercial for their leader, in which he pretends to be the normal bloke he most certainly is not (normal people don’t become Prime Ministers, trust me) , then good luck to them. But the BBC should play no part in such fictions.

The kitchen in which they stood was not a normal kitchen in a normal home. Leave aside the armed guards outside. Can we doubt that every action was choreographed, and that every object in it was carefully placed to promote an image? What’s more, you and I pretty much paid for it.

For nearly eight years, in a piece of cheek still widely unknown to the public, the far-from-poor Camerons claimed £1,700 a month, tax-free, in Parliamentary expenses to pay the mortgage interest on this, their Oxfordshire village home.

This made Mr Cameron (who had another home only 70 miles away) one of the highest claimers of housing expenses in Parliament. While it’s good to see inside the house the taxpayer provided, at last, mightn’t a question on this subject have been in order, under the circumstances? Instead the First Lord of the Treasury was asked if it was a handicap to be posh.

Meanwhile, over on the equally impartial Channel 4 and Sky, Jeremy Paxman got clean away with asking Ed Miliband the insulting and patronising question: ‘Are you all right, Ed?’

I was pleased to see that Mr Miliband gave as good as he got. But is this what politics has come to? It seems so.

The loopy logic of losing an hour

In the small hours of this morning, this country went through the mad annual ritual of moving the clocks forward. For me (and I suspect many others), this means many weeks of something rather like jet-lag, only without the journey.

There’s very little hard evidence (if any) that this performance does any good at all. We do it out of inertia, and, if we’re not careful, EU zealots will soon force us to get up even earlier by lining us up with Berlin time. They never give up.

Much like man-made global warming, the strange cultish belief in falsifying the time was spread by fanatics.

An annoying businessman called William Willett was cross that it didn’t stay light long enough in the evening for him to finish his golf game, and also peeved that other people slept in on sunny mornings.

So he resolved to force us all to change our lives to suit people like him. The First World War – wars are always a good moment for crazed ideas to be implemented in a rush – gave him the chance. As with so many other daft things, we have been doing it so long that nobody ever even thinks about them.

The Germanwings crash

For some time now I have been urging an independent inquiry into the correlation between the use of ‘antidepressants’, suicide and (less often) mass killing.

This is not because I know if there is a connection, but because there have been so many episodes suggesting one that an investigation seems to be to necessary.

Now I learn that pilot Andreas Lubitz, who apparently deliberately crashed a plane killing all aboard, had received ‘treatment’ for a ‘serious depressive episode’. Once again, oughtn’t we at least to look?

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